The National Book Awards revealed its nonfiction longlist, with 10 books contending for the annual literary prize.
Camonghne Felix, a nominee for the National Book Award for poetry in 2019, was nominated this year for Let the Poets Govern: A Declaration of Freedom. Wil Haygood made the longlist for The War Within a War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home.
Rozina Ali was longlisted for Seasons of Fury: Four Families and the Rise of Islamophobia in America, as were Colin Asher for The Midnight Special: The Secret Prison History of American Music; Zayd Ayers Dohrn for Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground; and Abdelrahman ElGendy for Huna: A Memoir of Revolution, Prison, and Becoming.
Sara Nović made the longlist for Mother Tongue, alongside Joseph Osmundson for Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood; Angela Pelster for The Evolution of Fire: Essays on Crisis and Becoming; and Wendy S. Walters, A Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint.
The judges for this year’s prize are Eve L. Ewing, Audrey I-Wei Huang, Jonathan C. Slaght, Robert Warrior, and Lidia Yuknavitch.
Previous winners of the National Book Award for nonfiction include Paul Monette for Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story; Andrew Solomon for The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression; Tiya Miles for All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake; and Omar El Akkad for One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.
The shortlist for this year’s award will be revealed on Oct. 6, and the winner will be announced at a ceremony in New York on Nov. 18.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
